The Plutonium Files Part 3

Holland: What was thata"90?

Howland: He got 4.7 [micrograms] once a day, which was 49 [plutonium]a Holland: Well, we will get it out and find out where he is and what he is doing and Iall let you know.

Howland: Louie Hempelmann a has medical results on him. Theyave got the most complete work-up results, because they did all the chemical a.n.a.lysis out there.a Dwight should have the rest of the information.

Holland: The fellowas name was what?

Howland: Eb [sic] Cade.

A month after Cadeas injection, Langham gave a cla.s.sified talk in Chicago to other Manhattan Project doctors about the experiment: aThe subject was an elderly male whose age and general health was such that there is little or no possibility that the injection can have any effect on the normal course of his life,a he began.21 Langham said the plutonium solution that he prepared was designed to produce the amaximum depositiona in human bone. aThis presumably would produce an excretion rate comparable to that of a worker having absorbed the material at a slow rate thereby depositing a maximum amount in the bone where it is probably the most damaging.a22 In charts accompanying the talk, Langham noted that 332 counts per minute were detected in Ebbas urine in the first twenty-four-hour period after injection, declining to 119 counts three months later.23 By contrast, exposed laboratory workersa"individuals with nose counts in excess of 50 counts per minutea"showed only an average of 2.2 counts per minute in their urine samples.24 The excretion rate of human beings was surprisingly low, Langham said, and the leveling off was much slower athan with rats.a Despite the elaborate planning, the experiment was flawed.26 Samples of Ebbas urine from before and after the injection were accidentally pooled together, providing no control sample.25 Scientists also worried that Ebbas kidney damage could have affected the excretion rate.

Five days after the injectiona"and nearly three weeks after the accident a"Ebbas bones were set. The timing of the surgery enabled the scientists to complete one critical component of the experiment: obtain bone samples from Ebb after the plutonium had circulated in his body. The samples showed the plutonium had indeed gone to the bone. In one fragment, scientists detected 82 counts per minute. Fifteen of Ebbas teeth also were pulled, purportedly because Ebb was suffering from gum inflammation and tooth decay.27 The teeth, as well as portions of his gum tissue and jawbone, were a.n.a.lyzed for plutonium content. Plutonium also goes to the jawbone where the teeth are embedded.

Lawrence Suchow, a young enlisted man, spent about a week in June emptying Ebbas bedpan. He had been cautioned to be very careful taking the urine away and never saw any family members or doctors stopping in to see Ebb. Two months or so had elapsed since the accident and Ebb still appeared to be in great pain. aHe was just moaning,a Suchow remembered.28 aHe seemed in terrible shape. He looked to me like he was not going to make it for a few days.a One of the still-unexplained aspects of the case is what happened to Jesse Smith, the driver. He was hospitalized for approximately nine months with a fractured hip. In a letter written two years after the accident, a Major William Clarkson in Oak Ridge asked Hymer Friedell about Smithas case. X rays taken in January 1946 and March 1947 showed that Smithas bones still had failed to heal. And a colleague, he added, ais at a loss to explain the failure of the bone to unite and because of the large amount of laboratory work done while he was hospitalized, was wondering if, perhaps he had received asome stuffa given by a member of this office.a29 In a response to Clarkson written three days later, Friedell said he couldnat remember the manas name who had received the material and suggested that Clarkson contact Joe Howland or Wright Langham. aJoe Howland actually gave the material and he might remember the manas name,a Friedell added.30 aAs I remember it, the individual who received the material was an older Negro and had multiple fractures.a Although Clarkson had asked for information on Jesse Smith, the driver, Friedellas response seems to refer to Ebb Cade. Friedell does not mention the patientas name or the word aplutonium,a so it is not absolutely certain to which of the men he was referring. No written evidence whatsoever has been found suggesting that Smith received plutonium. And if Friedell was referring to Cade, it would be further confirmation of Howlandas version of the story.

9.

NEXT IN LINE: ARTHUR AND ALBERT.

Itas not clear why the Manhattan Project doctors abandoned their plan to use a hospital patient in Rochester or Chicago and chose Ebb Cade instead. But sixteen days after Cade was injected, Arthur Hubbard, a bespectacled and distinguished-looking white businessman from Austin, Texas, was injected with plutonium in Chicago by Robert Stoneas group.

As a young man, Arthur had been recruited to play baseball for St. Edwardas University, a small college in Austin.1 During one game, he glanced up and saw a determined-looking girl named Selma watching him from the stands. The couple fell in love and got married. Eventually they had seven children, one of whom died as a toddler after eating mistletoe at Christmas.

When Arthuras baseball days were over, he purchased land in the hill country outside Austin where he cut down cedar trees, split them into posts, and sold them for fences and firewood. When gas heaters replaced woodstoves, he moved to town and opened Hubbardas Baseball Inn, which sold beer and barbecue sandwiches and became a watering hole for the police chief and the county commissioners.

Arthur had enjoyed excellent health until the latter part of June 1944, when he noticed a swelling under the front part of his chin. The swelling increased to the size of a ahenas egga and was excised four months later.2 Doctors diagnosed Arthur with squamous cell carcinoma and subsequently exposed the affected area to two thousand roentgens of localized radiation. Within two weeks the cancer was back, and Arthur underwent another surgical procedure and another round of radiation.

A friend who was a surgeon urged Arthur to get treatment at University of Chicagoas Billings Hospital. The hospital was just a few minutesa walk from the Met Lab, and many of the doctors who worked at the lab also had privileges at the hospital. aWe knew they were experimenting with some new treatment,a Arthuras daughter, Ripple Guess, said.3 But neither Ripple nor any of Arthuras other children suspected the so-called treatment consisted of an injection of top-secret material that would be used in a weapon soon to be dropped on j.a.pan.

In his late sixties when he contracted cancer, Arthur underwent aseven different plastic operative procedures,a including the removal of his lower jaw.4 Eventually he was fed by tube because his throat and mouth had become so painful that he could no longer swallow. At 9:17 A.M. on April 26, 1945, several weeks after he entered the hospital, he was injected with 6.5 micrograms of plutonium in a citrate solution, a dose equal to 120 times the radiation an average person receives in a year. Afterward, his urine was collected in gallon bottles filled with hydrochloric acid and samples of his stool were placed in aseal-fasta cardboard containers.5 He was a.s.signed the code name CHI-1, a number that signified that he was the first Chicago patient injected with plutonium. A year later Met Lab scientists explained the logic behind the injection in a secret report: Since people were of necessity exposed to some degree to plutonium and since plutonium is known to be very radiotoxic it was obviously desirable to have some method of determining whether or not a given person had any plutonium in him.6 It was equally desirable to be able to estimate as accurately as possible how much was deposited in any person. Animal experiments were used to procure as much data as possible. Some human studies were needed to see how to apply the animal data to the human problems.

Soon after Arthur Hubbard was injected, Joseph Hamilton and his colleagues in Berkeley began scouting the corridors of the University of California Hospital in San Francisco for a suitable human candidate for their own plutonium experiment. For more than a year, Hamilton and his a.s.sociates had been injecting plutonium into rats. Now Hamilton, a compulsive and impatient experimenter, was eager to ratchet the studies up to the next level. In January of 1945, the very month that Los Alamosas Wright Langham perfected the chemical technique for detecting plutonium in human urine and feces, Hamilton notified the Met Labas Arthur Compton that he was ready ato undertake, on a limited scale, a series of metabolic studies with product [plutonium] using human subjects.a7 Although Compton was a religious man, his moral scruples apparently were overridden by his fear of plutonium and his conviction that the human experiments were necessary.

Joseph Hamilton held dual academic appointments: He was a professor of medical physics at UC-Berkeley and a professor of experimental medicine and radiology at UCSF. This arrangement, he said, allowed him access to aclinical material.a The aclinical materiala that caught his eye in May of 1945 was house painter Albert Stevens, a shrunken, pale man on Ward B of the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.8 Albert had long been a familiar figure in the small town of Healdsburg, California, his bladelike body rattling up and down ladders with cans of paint or slouching in a block of shade with an unfiltered cigarette between his fingers. In the 1920s Albert had set off for California in a skinny-wheeled Model T with a birdas nest of furniture piled on top after a doctor told him his asthmatic wife would not survive another year in Ohio. The West was still an uncharted wilderness then, and the rutted roads often bloomed into lakes or vanished in the prairie gra.s.ses. The journey took a year and it was one of the happiest times of his life. In the old photographs, he is tall and slim and always grinning.

The years had taken their toll on Albert, and by the spring of 1945 he bore little resemblance to the smiling young man in the photographs. For several months he had been experiencing extremely sharp pains in his stomach.9 The pain was so fierce, so consuming, it was as if the finches and canaries he kept were free and he, Albert Stevens, were in the cage. He talked to the birds often, coaxing them to sing for his young grandson. Now the musical notes spilled over his shoulders, sweet and clear. But Albert was listening to the drab complaint within him. The pain weakened him, draining the color from his face and hair, until finally he was a prematurely old man.

One doctor said he had lost fifteen pounds; another put it at forty. A local physician suspected Albert had a malignant ulcer that had spread to the liver and advised him to consult specialists at the University of California Hospital.1011 Albert reluctantly agreed. It meant he would miss part of the spring. In his backyard, lumps of hard fruit hung from the orange tree and in the tangled blackberry bushes along the wall. The seventy-five-mile trip south to San Francisco was beautiful. The hills were still a vivid green, and splotches of yellow mustard spilled across the slopes.

Albert arrived at the hospital in San Francisco the first week of May 1945, the week Germany announced its surrender. Just three weeks earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had guided the nation during the war and had approved the atomic bomb project, died. President Harry Truman was briefed on the new weapon on April 25 by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army General Leslie Groves.

Albert was slated to undergo a battery of tests in the hospital. The cost was $5.25 a day plus a $30 deposit.12 The medical expenses were reasonable, but Albert was unemployed and it was a lot of money to sc.r.a.pe together. The hospital also insisted that Albertas family replace any blood used for transfusions, so his son and daughter-in-law flew down from Michigan to donate. Afterward they paced the corridors and waited for the results of the diagnostic tests.

In the first few days of his hospital stay, Albert underwent a routine workup. A urinalysis and chest X ray were normal. His abdomen was concave and tender to the touch. Small curds of milk and coffee grounds were found in his stomach. He was placed on a standard hospital diet and after a few days felt asubstantially improved.a An upper gastrointestinal series was conducted. Both a radiologist and a surgical consultant concluded that Albert probably had cancer but suggested a gastroscopy be done to confirm the diagnosis.13 For some reason, however, the procedure, which involves inserting a scope through the mouth to visually inspect the stomach, was not done. When the other diagnostic tests were completed, the doctors relayed the bad news to the family: Albert had stomach cancer and would probably not live more than another six months. He was fifty-eight years old.

Through some invisible network, perhaps nothing more than a hallway conversation, scientists working on top-secret research for the Manhattan Project learned of Albert. While doctors in San Francisco were doing their diagnostic tests, Joseph Hamiltonas group in Berkeley began preparations for their first human plutonium experiment. Hamiltonas team prepared a solution that consisted of mostly plutonium-238 and a small amount of plutonium-239. Plutonium-238 is 276 times more radioactive than plutonium-239 and therefore has the potential to cause much more biological damage. Plutonium-238 probably was used because it was easier to measure with the crude instruments of the time.

Kenneth Scott, the chubby scientist who had been working at the Rad Lab since John Lawrence had injected his first human patient with radiophosphorous, transported the plutonium from Berkeley to the hospital.14 The son of an aspiring beautician and a locomotive engineer, Scott had worked his way through high school and the University of California at Berkeley and later claimed to have successfully cured animal tumors with LSD15. Like Hamilton, Scottas interest in radioisotopes was accidental, having begun after he went to a abeer party with a bunch of physicists.a16 On May 14 the mixture that Scott had brought to the hospital was injected into one of Albertas veins. Patricia Durbin, the scientist who as an undergraduate worked in Hamiltonas lab, said years later the injection was the equivalent of a acarcinogenic dose.a Albert was designated CAL-1, the first California patient injected with plutonium.17 On the day Albert was injected, five rats were injected with the same solution.18 Two of the rats were killed a day later and the plutonium in their lungs, liver, kidney, and skeleton was measured. The other three rats were allowed to live for the remainder of the experiment.

In an interview several decades later, Kenneth Scott said that UCSF radiologist Earl Miller injected the plutonium into Albertas body.19 Miller had been hired at the University of California at San Francisco in 1940 by Robert Stone and was acting chief of the radiology department while Stone was at the Met Lab.20 For decades Miller denied that he had any involvement in the experiment. aI never, never, never injected any radioactive material into anybody,a he said in May 1995, about two months before his death.21 aThese people,a Miller told other interviewers, athe people that were chosen usually in these studies, they were doomed.22 They were ready to die.a Four days after the injection, with the plutonium coursing through his bloodstream and already settling in his bones, Albert was wheeled into surgery. He was lain on his right side and a pillow placed under his chest. Then a long incision paralleling the ninth rib was made. Surgeons found a ahuge, ulcerating, carcinomatous ma.s.sa that had grown into his spleen and liver.23 Initially the doctors were planning to remove his entire stomach, but halfway through the operation, they decided against it. Half of the left lobe of the liver, the entire spleen, most of the ninth rib, lymph nodes, part of the pancreas, and a portion of the omentuma"an ap.r.o.n of fat covering the internal organsa"were taken out.

According to a note written by the surgeon, the specimens were handed to Earl Miller as they were removed from Albertas unconscious body.24 Miller was to take a portion of each specimen and then send the remainder to the hospital pathology department, where the cancer diagnosis was to be confirmed. The surgeon apparently agreed to the division because he erroneously thought that Albert had been given radioactive phosphorous by the X-ray department for aspecial studies.a The operation was expertly done.25 The incision along the ninth rib was sutured with fine cotton thread and a small catheter was inserted in an opening so that penicillin could be administered for the next forty-eight hours. aThe patient withstood the procedure exceedingly well.26 He was returned to the ward in good condition,a the surgeon wrote.

On May 19, the day after the operation, there is a verbal order from Miller in Albertas medical records instructing that urine and stool samples are to be asaved for Mr. Scott who will collect them each day.a27 On May 21 there is another notation in Albertas medical records that states: aAll specimens going to Dr. Miller.a28 The hospital pathologist, James F. Rinehart, found evidence of a huge, cheeselike ulcer in Albertas stomach. But after carefully examining the specimens under a microscope, he came to a startling conclusion: Albert didnat have cancer. He had a abenign gastric ulcer with chronic inflammation.a29 The ma.s.s removed by surgeons was apparently part of the ulcer.

Disbelief rippled through the medical staff. The surgeon noted that the operation was a aradical procedure to do for a benign process.a30 Earl Miller became extremely upset by the findings and spent days looking at Albertas slides, thinking there was a mistake. But ahe just didnat have it,a Scott recalled of the cancer diagnosis.31 Scott, too, seems to have been troubled by what happened to Albert Stevens. After he retired, he was interviewed for an oral history by Berkeley medical historian Sally Hughes. The interview was conducted in December 1979 at Scottas bedside in Novato, California. Scott, who was then about seventy years old, was diabetic, disabled by a stroke, embittereda"and drunk. Lying in a hospital bed with his wife hovering nearby, Scott told Hughes that he left the Crocker lab in part because Hamilton wanted to do some aincautious experimentsa: Scott: I thought they were morally wrong.32 Hughes: Are you talking now about the human experiments?

Scott: Yes.

Hughes: And he went ahead and did those?

Scott: Yes, he did, and he did the first one with my help.

Hughes: That was the plutonium?

Scott: Plutonium-248 [sic], which we gave to this nice man who was scheduled for stomach surgery. They were surea"Earl Miller, for example, was surea"that he had cancer of the stomach and his probable survival wasnat very great. He was fifty-five, maybe, when I first found him. We injected him with plutonium-238, and the story of it is that he didnat have a cancer that anyone could demonstrate. Earl Miller got very upset with that and looked for days at slides of this manas post-op remains, and he just didnat have it. I got very interested in him as a person, and I contracted through the laboratory to buy all of his urine and feces, for which he would get a monthly check. We would go up once a week and pick it up in acid carbolase in various bottles we left up there with him.

Hughes: Did he know what was going on?

Scott: Never told him.

Hughes: What was the outcome?

Scott: Finally the laboratory wouldnat pay for his feces any more. He was in excellent health. His sister was a nurse and she was very suspicious of me. But to my knowledge he never found out, and he slipped through our fingers at the age of eighty-eight. He died of something.

Hughes: Nothing to do with the plutonium?

Scott: He got many times the so-called lethal textbook dose of plutonium. Patricia Durbin knows more about that. Sheas kept up with his data.

Hughes: In those days it was possible to do experiments on human beings with such ease?

Scott: Yes, yes.

Hughes: What did it involve?

Scott: It involved getting a needy patient who had a known disease, or thought it was known. He came out of the clinic for us at UC. I took the plutonium over there and gave it to Earl Miller, who injected it into this guy.

Albertas medical records show that he signed consent forms for both the anesthesia and surgery. But there is no mention of informed consent for any injection of radioactive material. A doc.u.ment decla.s.sified in 1994 also strongly suggests that neither Albert nor the second California patient injected with plutonium were told of the injections.33 Albert was discharged from the hospital a month after his admittance. Hamilton soon grew worried that he might leave the Bay area, and on July 7, 1945, wrote a letter to Robert Stone asking whether it would be possible to pay him fifty dollars a month to make sure he stayed in the Berkeley area: Kenneth [Scott] and I are very much afraid that the man may sell his house and go to live at some distant point which would, of course, put an end to our most interesting series of experiments.34 This proposal may be totally irregular and out of keeping with Army policy, but since we have, to date, maintained daily collections of all excretions, it would seem most unfortunate not to have the a.s.surance of his continued presence within a reasonable distance from Berkeley.

A couple of days later, Hamilton also wrote to Joseph Howland at Oak Ridge about the problem. Howland responded with a memo suggesting some possible ways to solve Albertas afinancial embarra.s.smenta: 3a. Pay for his care in a hospital or nursing home as a service.35 b. Place this individual on Dr. Hamiltonas payroll in some minor capacity without release of any cla.s.sified information.

4. It is not recommended that he be paid as an experimental subject only.

If Scottas memory is accurate, the solution they apparently arrived at was to pay Albert for his urine and stool samples. Albertas son, Thomas, said he remembered that his father kept the samples in a shed behind the house. His father believed the collections were part of his follow-up care. aThey sent an intern and a nurse down once a week from the hospital.36 He was led to believe it was all done because of the operation he had. They kept saying he was doing very well, that it was an unusual operation.a Thomas and his sister, Evelyn, who were both in their thirties at the time of the experiment, said their father seemed completely unaware that he was part of a medical experiment. All that they knew for sure was that their fatheras medical care was free. aMy mother and I figured they were using him for a guinea pig,a Evelyn said.37 aWe knew they were using things they werenat sure of. But he was dying, and we were praying that something would help. And it did help.a So they believed, because Albertas children were never told that their father did not have cancer. For decades, Thomas said he checked ayesa on every medical form asking if there was a history of cancer in the family.

In 1946, almost a year after Albertas injection, the Berkeley group published a cla.s.sified report t.i.tled aA Comparison of the Metabolism of Plutonium in Man and the Rat.a The abstract begins: aThe fate of plutonium injected intravenously into a human subject and into rats was followed in parallel studies.a38 A description of the body parts removed from Albert on the operating tablea"the specimens that were not delivered to the pathology departmenta"appears in the report. aFour days after the plutonium had been administered, specimens of rib, blood, spleen, tumor, omentum, and subcutaneous tissue were obtained from the patient.a39 Albertas rib was sc.r.a.ped with a sharp instrument, split longitudinally, and the marrow removed. The different parts of the bone were ashed and a.n.a.lyzed for plutonium. Most of the material had gravitated to the marrow and trabecular bone, the lacy spongelike bone threaded with marrow. The experiment showed that rats excreted plutonium more quickly than human beings, the report noted, thus making athe problem of chronic plutonium poisoning a matter of serious concern for those who come in contact with this material.a40 The authors of the aMan and Rata paper included Josephine Crowley, H. Lanz, Kenneth Scott, and Joseph Hamilton. In 1947 C. L. Marshall, an AEC deputy decla.s.sification officer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, refused to decla.s.sify the report: aIt contains material, which in the opinion of the management of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, might adversely affect the national interest,a he wrote.41 The refusal is one of the only doc.u.ments made public so far in which national security is cited as a reason for not decla.s.sifying information related to a human experiment.

10.

TRINITY SITE.

While Ebb Cade, Arthur Hubbard, and Albert Stevens struggled to regain their health, the Manhattan Projectas medical doctors turned their attention to the desolate area in southern New Mexico where the worldas first atomic bomb would be tested. The war in Europe was over, but the beaches on the small island of Okinawa, the stepping-stone to the j.a.panese mainland, were red with blood. The casualties were horrendous on both sides. While Marines went from cave to cave with flame-throwers and grenades, suicidal kamikaze pilots were inflicting heavy casualties and unspeakable terror on American s.h.i.+ps.

At the Met Lab, scientists had grown divided over whether the atomic bomb should be used against j.a.pan. A subcommittee headed by n.o.bel laureate James Franck was formed to examine the social and political implications of the revolutionary new weapon.1 Its members included Glenn Seaborg, James J. Nickson, the young medical doctor involved in the TBI experiment at the Chicago Tumor Clinic, and, of course, Leo Szilard. After much debate, the group concluded the bomb should not be used against j.a.pan for two reasons: First, such a powerful weapon would necessarily involve the killing of thousands of people and engender an att.i.tude of fear, suspicion, and hate toward the United States. Second, the United States might wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons by international agreement after the war, but its position would be weakened if the bomb had already been used. The Franck committee urged that the United States demonstrate the power of the new weapon before the eyes of the world on a barren island.

No one lobbied harder for this position than Leo Szilard, the Met Labas enfant terrible and the scientist who had done so much to get the entire bomb project going. Arthur Compton, who was trying to hold his tumultuous staff together, disagreed with Szilard but presented his views fairly in his postwar memoirs: There were few who sensed as clearly as did Szilard the shock that would be felt throughout the world if the atomic bomb destroyed large numbers of j.a.panese lives.2 This he thought of as an international crime and believed that many in all parts of the world would share this view. He had been willing to approve and even to urge the use of the bomb against the Germans, for in this case it would be an evil less than that of the human destruction he felt sure would result if the n.a.z.is should gain the victory. He could not persuade himself that the case was the same with regard to the j.a.panese.

The Met Labas debate was mirrored at the national level by members of the innocuously named Interim Committee. The all-civilian group, which was headed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, had been created to consider issues relating to the use of the new weapon. Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Compton acted as scientific advisors. The committee bandied about the idea of demonstrating the weaponas power on a uninhabited island but rejected it for several reasons: First, even if the initial atomic bomb test was successful, there was no guarantee the second bomb wouldnat be a dud. Second, the j.a.panese might attempt to interfere with the delivery of the weapon or put American prisoners of war at the detonation site. Third, the panel thought it was doubtful that j.a.panas fanatic military leaders would be inclined to surrender after witnessing a bloodless demonstration. And finally, the group believed such a test would eliminate the important element of surprise. Although Ernest Lawrence would become a powerful advocate of bigger nuclear weapons after the war, his hard-line nature had not yet emerged and he was the last of the scientific advisors to give up on the idea of a peaceful demonstration.

In Los Alamos, the debate over using the bomb was muted, in part a testament to the charismatic leaders.h.i.+p of J. Robert Oppenheimer as well as the crus.h.i.+ng workload. Los Alamites were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The momentum of the technology itself was driving the project forward, and many scientists were intensely curious to see if the agadgeta would work.

Stafford Warren knew the detonation of an atomic bomb could release radioactivity equivalent to a ton of radium, or a million grams, into the atmosphere. aNow before the war, hospitals and doctors treating cancer thought they were in marvelous shape if they had a quarter of a gram or maybe a few milligram needles a and when you thought of a ton and a million grams, my G.o.d!a Trinity site, the place where the first atomic test would be conducted, was about 230 miles south of Los Alamos in the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) valley.3 The Jornada was a treacherous shortcut on the Camino Real, the Kingas Highway that linked old Mexico to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico.

By early May, the engineers were constructing the tower from which the weapon would be dropped. Oppenheimer established a new organization within the lab called Project TR to oversee test preparations.4 The laboratoryas official history indicates that Project TR did not include a medical group until a month later, a small oversight that again demonstrates the second-cla.s.s status of the medical doctors. They were the last hired, the last to be brought into planning on critical projects. Although the physicians grew accustomed to their lowly status, a tinge of bitterness often crept into their voices when they discussed their roles with historians after the war. aEverybody was too busy with getting the bomb fabricated to worry about what happened afterwards.5 In fact, wead get brushed off,a Stafford Warren recalled years later. Hymer Friedell, his sidekick, described the men a.s.signed to oversee health and safety operations as ahangers on.a High-level officials at Los Alamos did not give serious attention to fallout hazards until a few months before the detonation, when two of their physicists, Joseph O. Hirschfelder and John Magee, did a wideranging study and concluded that radioactive debris might pose a more severe hazard than anyone had predicted.6 aIn spite of all this work,a Hirschfelder remembered, avery few people believed us when we predicted radiation fallout from the atom bomb.7 On the other hand, they did not dare ignore this possibility.a Leslie Groves a.s.signed Stafford Warren the task of making sure none of the test partic.i.p.ants or nearby residents was injured by the radioactive fallout. Hirschfelder said that he and Magee were Stafford Warrenas achief helpers,a but their mission had such low priority that they had to borrow an automobile from a friend to get to Trinity.8 Warren also received help from Louis Hempelmann and members of his health group, who included James Nolan, Wright Langham, and Paul Aebersold, the Berkeley scientist who had lent Robert Stone a hand in his prewar neutron experiment and had recently transferred to Los Alamos.

In the weeks leading up to the test, the men toured the blast area, studied topographical maps, consulted with meteorologists, and read everything they could about the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, the largest explosion ever recorded. Although they were both deathly afraid of flying, Warren and Hempelmann flew over the Trinity site. From their light aircraft, the doctors could see that there were aa lot of peoplea living in the vicinity of the test area. aWe suddenly discovered Indian reservations there with lots of people.9 And then there were dude ranches that somebody hadnat thought to mention,a Warren remembered.

After Warren developed a reasonably good idea of what the fallout pattern would be, he spent twenty-four hours drafting an evacuation plan for Leslie Groves.

I asked for a couple of hundred troops, jeeps, and trucks, because General Groves had told me that he would have the power of marshal lawa"he had talked with the governora"and that I would operate under that at that time.10 So I said to myself that if I needed to evacuate people, I would have to have armed troops to go in and take them out. Suppose grandma was cooking dinner and she says, aThe heck with you boys.a These were independent people and had been living that way. They frequently had a rifle behind the door and wouldnat take any nonsense.

General Groves initially scoffed at Warrenas safety plan, but eventually he ordered a couple of military trucks and more than 150 troops to stand by in case the surrounding towns needed to be evacuated. Leaving nothing to chance, Warren also directed that two planes remain on standby in Oak Ridge in order to ferry four psychiatrists to New Mexico in the event the bomb failed and the scientists had nervous breakdowns.11 aOne of the big problems that kept nagging my group,a he explained, awas the fact that if the first bomb test was a fizzle we would have a tremendous trauma and a psychological disintegration, really, of a great many of the scientists who had been working so hard on this bomb.a12 By early July, word had come down that the bomb was to be detonated on July 16, 1945, providing weather conditions were permissible. On that date, President Truman would be in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet Unionas Joseph Stalin. On the negotiating table were postwar concerns in Europe, surrender terms for the j.a.panese, and Russiaas planned entry into the Pacific campaign. If the Trinity test was successful, Truman would have more bargaining power and less reason to bring the Soviets into the war with j.a.pan.

But mid-July also happened to be one of the worst times in New Mexico to test such a weapon because of the frequent summer thunderstorms. True to predictions, a fierce thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico in the early morning hours of July 16, bringing lightning, high winds, and several inches of rain. Oppenheimer was beside himself with worry. Groves was furious. And many scientists advocated canceling the test. When Jack Hubbard, a meteorologist, finally advised Groves that the storm front would pa.s.s and that the weather would be acceptable at dawn, the general snarled that Hubbard had better be right aor I will hang you.a Fortunately, Hubbardas prediction was correct.13 The skies cleared and the stars came out. The atomic bomb test was back on schedule.

At 5:15 A.M., Warren placed a call to Hymer Friedell, who was standing by at a hotel in Albuquerque. Friedell had been stationed there in case the bomb destroyed the southern half of the state and incinerated all the scientists. aLetas synchronize watches,a Warren suggested.14 aItas five-fifteen here, fifteen minutes to zero.a Warren told Friedell that field monitors were in position for the blast and everything was going according to schedule. aKeep this line open, no matter what,a he added, reminding Friedell before he hung up that he would be in charge if Warren was killed in the blast.15 Fifteen minutes later Warren lay in a ditch filled with hay and leaves nine miles from Ground Zero. His feet were toward the blast area; his eyes were protected by dark welderas gla.s.ses. As the seconds ticked away, many of the other scientists sheepishly crept down in the ditch as well. aThey were embarra.s.sed, you know, to lie down; so I lay down, myself, so there would be no question, then Dr. Hempelmann and Nolan.16 Then it went off. And, at first, of course, there was a feeling of great heat as if you had just opened a big furnace door, and then it was shut. There was a funny squeezing sensation to the ears, in the mastoids, that I have noticed several times since and never was able to identify as anything real. Then the fireball developed.a The scientists watched the awesome cloud as it rose into the sky and then turned to each other. Knowing their words would be recorded for posterity, some had thought in advance about what they were going to say and their language is filled with self-consciousness. Oppenheimer remembered a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: aNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.a17 While the scientists stood about congratulating each other, Leslie Groves bustled off to see how Stafford Warren and his monitors were doing. Warren, it seemed, was the one who might soon be in need of a psychiatrist. Remembered Groves: When I went to Warrenas headquarters in the base camp soon after the explosion, I was not pleased to discover that he had been so busy getting ready that he had gone without sleep for almost forty-eight hours.18 Although his decisions were sound and his instructions were clear, I was sure from listening to them as he talked over the telephone, thata"quite understandablya"his mind was not working so quickly as it normally did, by any means. Fortunately, we had at Alamogordo a Navy doctor who was familiar with our activitiesa"Captain George Lyons, and I suggested that he spell Warren for a few hours to give him some rest. I was displeased, too, with myself, because I felt that I had fallen down in not making certain that Warren would be in first-cla.s.s physical shape to handle the situation.

While Warren napped, his monitors spread out across the countryside. Hirschfelder and Magee, driving the borrowed sedan, stopped at the Bingham store, which was located about fifteen miles north of Ground Zero. An old man came out and looked at their white coveralls curiously. Then he broke out laughing and said, aYou boys must have been up to something this morning.19 The sun came up in the west and went on down again.a The monitors also stopped at William Wryeas ranch, which is about nine miles north of the Bingham store. Wrye and his wife had been on a trip and had just gotten home several hours earlier. When Wrye saw the monitors waving their bulky counters over his property later that morning, he went out and asked them what they were doing. aThey told me they were checking for radioactivity.20 I told him that we didnat have the radio on,a Wrye remembered in an interview in 1998. In a rocky gorge that was subsequently dubbed Hot Canyon, the monitors came across fallout readings of fifteen to twenty roentgens per hour. Since maps indicated the area was uninhabited, they turned around and left quickly.

In a few hours, the cloud had disappeared from sight. Feeling elated and yet strangely empty, many of the scientists piled into cars and headed back to Los Alamos. Wright Langham spotted a sedan with a flat tire on the side of the road just south of Albuquerque.21 It was Enrico Fermias car. Using methane gas from one of his radiation counters, Lang-ham inflated the tire and Fermi, who had been christened the aItalian Navigatora after the Chicago pile went critical, was on his way. The automobile that Hirschfelder and Magee had borrowed was so hot from fallout that it read four roentgens per hour in the driveras seat.22 Back in Los Alamos four days later, the car was still hot enough to throw sensitive Geiger counters in nearby laboratories off the scale.

Troubled by the high readings in Hot Canyon, Louis Hempelmann decided to spend the night at the Trinity base camp and do some further investigation. The following morning he met Hymer Friedell, and the two men drove into the rock-strewn gorge. To their dismay, they discovered a two-room adobe house, which the Army had somehow overlooked and omitted from the monitorsa maps. An elderly couple named the Raitliffs and their grandson lived there. The grandson had left for the Bingham store on horseback on the morning of the explosion, Hempelmann wrote: By being at Bingham during the day and indoors at night, he missed most of the heaviest exposure of the first day in ahot canyon.a23 During this day, Mr. Raitliff had spent most of the day outdoors but Mrs. Raitliff was indoors a large portion of the time. During the following two weeks there was no change in their usual habits of going indoors about 7:00a"8:00 oaclock to dinner, retiring after hearing the evening news broadcast and arising at about 6:00 AM.

During the next six months, Hempelmann and his fellow Manhattan Project doctors were to make several visits to the Raitliffsa ranch. Mr. Raitliff told Hempelmann that the ground and fence posts had the appearance of abeing covered with light snow, or of being afrosteda for several days after the shot,a particularly at sunrise and sunset.24 Although the family seemed healthy, Mr. Raitliff complained of anervousness, tightness in the chest and poor teeth.a25 Hempelmann did not think Mr. Raitliffas symptoms were related to his radiation exposure since the symptoms had been present before the detonation. But in a later memo, Hempelmann was less certain. The color of Mr. Raitliffas hands and lips, he wrote, indicated he might be aslightly anemic.a Hempelmann also examined the familyas animals and realized that they had been injured by radioactive debris from the cloud.26 The paws of two black house dogs were raw and bleeding from beta burns. aOne of the dogs was so badly affected that she was unable to walk except with extreme difficulty.a A milk cow and heifer and one of the dogs also had white hair on their back or patchy areas where the radioactive particles had sifted through their coats and irradiated their skin.27 Hempelmann estimated that the members of the Raitliff family each received about forty-seven roentgens, or nearly fifty rem, of whole-body radiation in the first two weeks after the Trinity test.28 Itas not known whether the family was ever informed of the exposure or urged to take precautions, although fifty rem can cause nausea in some people and increase the risk of contracting cancer.

William Wrye, who still lives on his ranch, said in 1998 his beard fell out three months after the Trinity explosion. aI was slick-faced except for the corner of my chin.29 When my beard grew back it came in gray, and a couple of months later, it came back black again.a Wrye told newspaper reporters the same thing in 1945, but the Manhattan Project doctors dismissed his statement as tomfoolery. Wrote Louis Hempelmann in a December 1, 1945, memo to the files: According to neighbors, this man, Bill Wrye, is a relatively young man who is turning gray prematurely.30 When teased about agetting old,a early in the spring of 1945, he attributed the change in color of his beard to the fact that he had accidentally rubbed adehorning pastea on his face. When the cattle began to show the effects of beta radiation, he changed his story and attributed the color change to the atomic bomb. According to the neighbors, Mr. Wrye is having fun at the expense of the newspapers. Since the radiation levels in the region of the Wrye Ranch are quite low, it has been decided not to investigate the story further.

The fallout from the Trinity test spread much farther than even an alarmist like Warren had dared to imagine. Some was discovered 1,100 miles away in the Wabash River in Vincennes, Indiana.31 When infuriated Eastman Kodak officials reported that radioactive particles from the river water had been absorbed into paper used in packaging and made tiny black spots on film, atomic scientists got their first hard data about how far fallout could travel.

11.

A aSMALL PIECE OF THE SUNa

Following the Trinity explosion, the action s.h.i.+fted to Tinian in the Mariana Islands, some 1,300 miles southeast of Tokyo. Tinian, along with Guam and Saipan, had been captured in August of 1944 from the j.a.panese, and the three were being used as air bases for Americaas newest long-range bomber, the B-29 Superfortress. Six runways, each two miles long and as wide as a ten-lane highway, had been constructed. Next to the runways were rows of glittering silver planes. For an hour and a half each evening at roughly fifteen-second intervals, the bombers would roll down the runway and lift off for j.a.pan with bellies full of incendiary bombs.

Leslie Groves had sent a thirty-seven-member team of civilians and military officials to Tinian to help a.s.semble and load the atomic bombs onto specially modified B-29s. One of the people at Tinian was Don Mastick, who had been a.s.signed the job of a.n.a.lyzing urine samples after his accident. The task was so revolting that one day he stormed into J. Robert Oppenheimeras office and said, aI canat stand what Iam doing.1 It stinks.a Oppenheimer was sympathetic; it seems the smell of the boiling urine was going up Mastickas ventilating hood and then blowing back down into Oppenheimeras office. He agreed to transfer Mastick to the crew in charge of dropping the bombs. Another Manhattan Project scientist at Tinian was Philip Morrison, one of Oppenheimeras former students. In the evenings, Morrison would sit on a coral ridge overlooking Tinian and watch the planes take off.2 Every so often he would see one of the bombers go careening into the sea or onto the beach where it burned like a torch. The implications of such a disaster happening to an airplane loaded with atomic bombs were almost too horrible to contemplate.

The components for two types of atomic weapons, a uranium and a plutonium bomb, were being s.h.i.+pped to Tinian at about the same time the Potsdam Declaration was issued. That doc.u.ment called upon j.a.pan to surrender unconditionally or face aprompt and utter destruction.a When the j.a.panese vowed to continue fighting, the United States moved ahead with preparations to drop the two bombs.3 On the morning of August 6, the Enola Gay, one of the specially modified B-29s, lumbered down the runway with its payload. At 8:15, it dropped the payloada"a uranium bomba"on Hiros.h.i.+ma. The city was immediately engulfed in roiling clouds of smoke and flames. aThe mushroom itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling ma.s.s of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside,a recalled Robert Caron, a tail gunner on the Enola Gay.4 Below the veil of clouds and smoke was an inferno of unimaginable proportions. At the hypocenter, the place on the ground directly below where the bomb was detonated, thousands of j.a.panese citizens were instantly incinerated. Those who were not killed on the spot suffered grotesque injuries. Their skin, burned by the flash and torn loose by the blast, hung like rags from their bodies. In an effort to ease the agony of burned flesh touching burned flesh, they walked through the city like sleepwalkers with their arms and hands held out in front of them, their skin hanging from their fingertips and chins. Many were killed by material from collapsing buildings or were impaled by flying debris. Injured residents who were pinned beneath roofs and walls were soon burned alive by firestorms that engulfed the city.

P. Siemes, a German Jesuit priest who lived in a novitiate about a mile from Hiros.h.i.+ma, later organized a nightmarish trip into the city to rescue two injured priests. When the sun came up the morning after the bombing, he saw a wasteland of ashes and rubble that extended as far as the eye could see: aThe banks of the river are covered with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses.5 On the broad street in the Hakus.h.i.+ma district, naked burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who still live. A few have crawled under the burnt-out autos and trains. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse.a Although the j.a.panese did not yet know what kind of a weapon had caused such destruction, Manhattan Project scientists had a pretty good idea of what they had unleashed. It was as if aa small piece of the suna had descended upon the city, Philip Morrison told members of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, which began meeting in the fall of 1945: There is formed what we have called the ball of fire, which is a hot, glowing ma.s.s something about one-third of a mile across, with a temperature of about a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit in the center of it.6 The effects from this small sun are as you would expect. In the first place, there is a sudden creation and expansion which pushes away with terrible violence the air that once occupied this region. This air, shocked into motion, as we say, moves just like a blast wave from a great explosion of TNT.a This pus.h.i.+ng air creates enormous pressure, even a great distance away. Behind the wave of pressure, which travels rapidly through the air, there comes great winds, 500 to 1,000 miles per hour, winds which damage and destroy all structures.a If you are near the sun, you must expect to get burned.a There are two more effects. At the instant of the explosion there is emitted from this small sun not only the great push through the air, the violent blast, which is the violent explosiona"there is not only the concentrated heat which you would expect from being close to the sun, there is also a great amount of radiation, like the radiation used by doctors, like the X-ray radiation used for the treatment of cancer. This radiation is very penetrating. There is no protection behind a foot of concrete, for example.

Although communication with Hiros.h.i.+ma was severed and it would take the j.a.panese government several days to figure out what had happened, the U.S. military decided that a aone-twoa punch was the only way to defeat j.a.pan. On August 9, three days later, another B-29 named Bockas Car rolled down the runway at Tinian carrying a plutonium implosion bomb. It exploded over Nagasaki at 11:02 A.M.

Once again the roiling clouds quickly obliterated a city. The destruction was so unbelievable that the bombing victims could find no words to describe it. Many compared the devastation to the agonies of h.e.l.l depicted in Buddhist paintings. The survivors made their way to air raid shelters where in the stifling gloom amid the groans and screams, they died. Thousands of others plunged into rivers. aA human dam!7 A human dam!a survivor Chie Setoguchi remembers thinking when she saw thousands of corpses bobbing in a river. aWho masterminded the atrocity of blocking a river with the corpses of human beings?a A sixteen-year-old postal worker named Sumiteru Taniguchi was blown off his bicycle and knocked unconscious. When he came to, he realized the skin from his shoulder to his fingertips had been peeled off and was hanging down alike a tattered old rag.a He managed to survive the first chaotic days and eventually was taken to a hospital, where he spent the next twenty-one months lying facedown on his stomach.8 He developed bedsores that penetrated to his bones and was in and out of the hospital for decades with mysterious skin lesions that would not heal.

Hisae Aoki, just eighteen years old, was pinned beneath the rubble of her house. As she felt the heat of the approaching fires, she struggled frantically to free herself.9 When her hair began burning, she managed to wrench herself free and ran from the house. She had been spared, only to watch as one after another of her family members died from radiation overexposure.

Within hours of the bombings of the two cities, surviving relatives began streaming back into the burning rubble looking for the remains of their loved ones. j.a.pan is a predominantly Buddhist country, and dead family members are usually cremated and their ashes interred in a family grave. In the ensuing years the survivors offer prayers for the repose of their souls. One of the most anguis.h.i.+ng experience for relatives of the bombing victims was the inability to find the remains of their loved ones.10 If a personas body is not found, the relatives feel the deceased personas soul can never rest peacefully in the world of the dead.

On August 15a"August 14 in the United Statesa"the j.a.panese people heard the voice of Emperor Hirohito, the venerated symbol of supreme authority in j.a.pan, broadcast over the radio. He told them that the country had surrendered. The enemy, he said, had begun to aemploy a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.aa11 Even before the people of j.a.pan heard the lugubrious voice of their emperor, the United Press was reporting that j.a.pan was preparing to surrender. On August 12 Stafford Warren and Louis Hempelmann were about to embark upon another round of interviews with ranchers near the Trinity site when Warren received an emergency call from Leslie Groves.12 The general wanted Warren to go to j.a.pan after the surrender to survey the radioactivity and damage from the weapons. Warren left Hempelmann at Trinity and hurried back to Los Alamos. Eventually a team of about forty Manhattan Project officials, including Hymer Friedell and Joseph Howland, was a.s.sembled. They stripped nearly all the Manhattan Project sites of detection equipment and then boarded a plane in San Francisco for Tinian. Once on the island, the doctors joined up with the Manhattan Project scientists who had helped prepare the bombs for delivery. Then they split into two parties. Hymer Friedell was with one group; Stafford Warren with another. From Tinian, both teams went to Hiros.h.i.+ma, and then Warrenas group continued to Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, back at home, Louis Hempelmann, ever the diligent doctor, proceeded to interview the Raitliff family and then returned to Los Alamos to write up his findings. No doubt he felt disgruntled about being left behind, but soon he would have an opportunity to see at home the same dreadful stages of radiation sickness that Warren and Friedell were about to encounter on a grand scale in j.a.pan.

At about 9:00 P.M. on August 21, a young Los Alamos physicist named Harry K. Daghlian left the regular Tuesday evening colloquium and returned to the a49 Rooma at Omega site, a building in a remote canyon where experiments with the cores of atomic bombs were conducted.13 At one end of the twenty-five-foot by twenty-five-foot room was the critical a.s.sembly where Daghlian worked. At the other was a guard, Robert Hemmerly, sitting at a desk with his back turned to the apparatus.

Daghlian began to lower a brick onto the a.s.sembly with his left hand when his instruments began chattering. The clicking sound told him a chain reaction was about to begin, and he started to withdraw his hand. Suddenly the brick slipped from his grasp and fell into the center of the a.s.sembly.14 Daghlian brushed the brick off with his right hand, but it was too late. A brief chain reaction was ignited, bathing the a.s.sembly in an unearthly blue glow.

It was the second time the blue glow had been seen at Omega site. On June 4, eight people were exposed to neutrons and gamma rays during an experiment to measure the critical ma.s.s of enriched uranium.15 Although the doses were large, especially to the two experimenters standing closest to the a.s.sembly, they were much smaller than what Daghlian received.

After brus.h.i.+ng the brick away, the young scientist felt a deep atingling sensationa in his right hand but no immediate pain.16 He was taken to the hospital by a companion, where he was examined by Louis Hempelmann and Paul Aebersold. Robert Stone is named as an aa.s.sistanta in one report, indicating that he may have flown in to Los Alamos to help.

There wasnat much the doctors could do to counteract the radiation damage, and Daghlianas condition deteriorated quickly. Ice pads and agrease gauze dressingsa were applied to his hands, but they didnat stop his arms from swelling to painful proportions.17 His hair fell out, he suffered intense abdominal pains, and eventually he slipped into a coma.

Even as Harry Daghlianas physical condition was deteriorating, General Groves began receiving disquieting news reports based on broadcasts by Radio Tokyo: Mysterious araysa were coming from the rubble; residents uninjured by the bomb were suddenly collapsing and dying; rescue workers were developing dangerously low blood counts. Fearful he would be yanked before Congress to explain why he had used such an inhumane weapon, Groves placed two phone calls on August 25 to Army Major Charles Rea, a surgeon in charge of the Oak Ridge hospital. He read line by line from one of the articles, trying to get the physician to explain to him the strange medical symptoms being reported by Radio Tokyo. The following is an excerpt from one of those phone calls: G: [Reading from article] aThe death toll at Hiros.h.i.+ma and at Nagasaki, the other j.a.panese city blasted atomically, is still rising, the broadcast said.18 Radio Tokyo described Hiros.h.i.+ma as a city of death. 90% of its houses, in which 250,000 had lived, were instantly crushed.a I donat understand the 250,000 because it had a much bigger population a number of years ago before the war started, and it was a military city. aNow it is peopled by ghost parade, the living doomed to die of radioactivity burns.a R: Let me interrupt you here a minute. I would say this: I think itas good propaganda. The thing is these people got good and burneda"good thermal burns.

G: Thatas the feeling I have. Let me go on and give you the rest of the picture. aSo painful are these injuries that sufferers plead: aPlease kill me,a the broadcast said. No one can ever completely recover.a R: This has been in our paper, too, last night.

G: Then it goes on: aRadioactivity caused by the fission of the uranium used in atomic bombs is taking a toll of mounting deaths and causing reconstruction workers in Hiros.h.i.+ma to suffer various sicknesses and ill health.a R: I would say this: You yourself, as far as radioactivity is concerned, it isnat anything immediate, itas a prolonged thing. I think what these people have, they just got a good thermal burn, thatas what it is. A lot of these people, first of all, they donat notice it much. You may get burned and you may have a little redness, but in a couple of days you may have a big blister or a sloughing of the skin, and I think that is what these people have had.

G: You see what we are faced with. Matthias [the young engineer in charge of the Hanford Engineer Works] is having trouble holding his people out there.